Washoe County Library System

"From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of communism....

A brilliant American president is also a psychopath. He has his finger on the red button. And he’s about to start a world war with our most dangerous enemy. Put your finger on the order button. Push it to read James Patterson’s best and scariest novel yet. “Pure Patterson… Blowback asks us to imagine what would happen if a narcissistic psychopath were elected to the White House [and] to experience the terror of the world hanging in the balance...

When the Moscow Station is left in ruins after a major intelligence breach, CIA analyst Jonathan Burke and agent Kyra Stryker are fast on the trail of Alden Maines, an upper-level CIA officer whose defection coincides with the murder of the director of Russias Foundation for Advanced Nuclear Research.

"Viet Nam, 1963. A female Viet Cong assassin is trawling the boulevards of Saigon, catching US Army officers off-guard with a single pistol shot, then riding off on the back of a scooter. Although the US military is not officially in combat, sixteen thousand American servicemen are stationed in Viet Nam "advising" the military and government. Among them are Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, two army investigators who have been tasked with tracking...

"An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens. “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of...

"After losing her first two forever homes, Noodle knows all about the sadness of goodbyes. But in her new home with Andrea and as an official Helper Hound, Noodle helps Gabriel deal with the loss of his grandfather"--

"These thirty short stories show an acknowledged master of the genre at the peak of his power. Most are set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their unfamiliar surroundings. In this languid life, Maugham shows how a tiny spark of stray emotion acts as the catalyst to human tragedy. In subtle contrast, the stories set in an English landscape provide more familiar territory...